yesterday on the internet

The internet has already fallen in and out of love with Vero

The internet has already fallen in and out of love with Vero

This past weekend, Vero — an app that had been languishing in relative obscurity since 2015 — shot up to the top position on the App Store charts. The company said the reason for its sudden growth was a concerted effort from the cosplay community on Instagram to join the platform, though it certainly helped that Vero had advertised that the first million users would get the app free for life, after which new users would be charged a subscription fee.

As hundreds of thousands of people rushed to sign up for a subscription fee-free account (just in case Vero became a thing), the app became plagued by technical issues and buckled under the pressure.

As Vero tried to get its app working again, a backlash spread on Twitter. Users began questioning the app's CEO and co-founder Ayman Hariri's previous experience as the deputy CEO of Saudi construction company Saudi Oger, and their tweets quickly morphed into calls to delete the app.

On the off chance it doesn’t become the next Instagram, Vero will join the exclusive club of social media apps hailed as the next big thing before quietly fading away. Among its cohorts are Peach, which took "the tech world by storm" in 2016, and Mastodon, where all the "cool kids" were migrating from Twitter last year. And everyone was talking about anonymous messaging app Sarahah that functioned equally cyberbullying hub... weren't they?